A Critique of the Political Economy of Algorithms: A Brief History of Google’s Technological Rationality

Paško Bilić argues that the dialectical relation between technics and technology proposed by Marcuse (1941) can help us better understand the contexts of building digital technologies as tools for control and dominance. In this article, he analyses Alphabet Inc.’s (Google) documents, such as the Securities and Exchange Filing (SEC) Form 10-Ks in the period between 2004 and 2016, as well as Search Quality Rating Guidelines (SQRG) between 2016 and 2017.

“The company produces two main types of commodities: audience commodity and algorithmic commodity, each solidifying the company’s control and dominance over Internet usage habits,” Bilić asserts.